Nerinx Hall High School is a community that believes that all students can learn and that all students will rise to challenges when held to high standards. In keeping with this idea, I will use technology to enable all students to not only to learn the curriculum I have planned out for them, but to create an individualized learning environment so each student can reach outside of her comfort zone and develop higher thinking skills and problem solving skills than even they believe possible.
My explanation and support of my Technology Vision Statement:
Since I first began studying to be a teacher, I have always seen technology as a vital part of education. My cooperating teacher from my student teaching noticed how interested I was in learning how technology can be useful part of mathematics learning and all the ideas I brought to my student teaching and told me that is how I would stand out from other new math teachers. In my eighteen years teaching at Nerinx Hall, I have made it my goal to research and implement technology to provide students with a more personalized, individual learning program that pushes them to develop their own critical thinking and problem solving skills so they use the information they learn in my class to attack and solve problems that may be unfamiliar to them. In the following paragraphs, I will explain my journey and the research I used to get to the place that I am now in my steps toward my technology vision.
When I first started teaching at Nerinx Hall, I taught Geometry Honors and Algebra I. I knew that the traditional way to teach Geometry (the way that I had learned) was to introduce theorems and postulates, have students write proofs for those theorems and solve problems using the relationships in the theorems and postulates. The problem with this type of teaching, is there is no student ownership of the knowledge, since the student had no part in seeing the relationship he or she was learning and developing it into a conjecture of his or her own words. Instead, students would follow what the teacher did, and repeat this process when trying to solve similar problems in the textbook. I found this to be very frustrating later in my mathematics journey as the problems became more complicated and required more critical thinking on my part because I had never learned how to apply my mathematical knowledge to problem solving on my own. At Nerinx, we had a program called The Geometer's Sketchpad that allowed students to explore relationships between geometric objects and come up with conjectures of their own. I then taught them how to defend these conjectures through proof, and gave them the opportunity to use this knowledge to solve geometric problems. At this time we had a limited number of very old Macintosh computers to work with, so this was just the beginning of my desire to use technology in order to stimulate the development of critical thinking skills.
After I was teaching at Nerinx for a few years, the administration began looking into starting a one-to-one laptop program. I jumped on the idea since the availability of newer, personal computers would immensly help me in my goal to use technology to develop better critical thinkers and problem solvers. Nerinx began by giving laptops to some teachers and a few students in order for them to research what the best laptop would be for the school and to find ways to implement this technology into the students' classes. Finally, the laptops were chosen and for four years, each new freshmen class received their own Apple laptop. At first, I focused on using the laptops with Sketchpad software to continue what I was already doing (although now that each student had their own computer, they could learn the software much more quickly and could do the investigations I created for it as individuals instead of partners) and also to develop more organization with a class website and note outlines. However, soon I discovered the METC Conference and after attending the first time, came back with all kinds of ideas to encourage higher order thinking skills in my students. I slowly began introducing things like online discussions questions to go with homework problems so each student had to choose at least one problem and explain to the other students in her class how she solved it, using her own words. There was so much research at the time about how if students could explain and teach other students how to solve problems, it enabled them to better understand the problem and helped them to be able to tackle more complicated problems that involved deeper thinking. I was excited to be able to encourage this through the use of wikis and discussion boards. I eventually became a member of the METC Conference planning committee and attended many other technology conferences, and was able to network with several professionals and find all kinds of fascinating ways to use technology to develop higher order thinking skills and problem solving skills. The only problem I had, was that I was still teaching classes of 22-25 students and found it very difficult to personalize the learning experience for each student. I soon found my answer at a math, science and technology conference I attended here in St. Louis.
At this conference, I attended a session called Flip Your Classroom, presented by Aaron Sams. I fell in love with the idea, bought his book (also written by Jon Bergmann, and began developing ways in which I could completely individualize my students' learning. At this time, I had also been using SMARTboards and SMART notebook for my class notes and discovered SMART Response, where each student could put their own answer to a problem into a clicker (or now directly with her laptop) and could check whether they were right or wrong immediately while her answer was recorded in my software. This way I could monitor students responses to see how well they were understanding how to solve problems and could also immediately see when students did not understand something and I needed to go over it again. In the past three years, I have been working on making and implementing videos so that my "lectures" are delivered directly to each student, and giving students time in my class to work together on problem solving so they can use each other and me as a resource for developing those skills instead of trying to develop them on their own with textbook work. Recently, I have begun using Google Classroom in conjunction with Google Docs and Google Forms to develop a program that allows my students to develop conjectures themselves through investigation using The Geometer's Sketchpad and Google Docs and then applying those ideas to problems solving in the classroom individually and collaboratively with immediate feedback through SMART Response.
Although my program is far from perfect and I still have far to go to reach my vision, I am happy with what I have accomplished so far. Most of my research for using technology to reach my goal has been through networking with other professionals, attending conferences and tweaking and applying what I learned to my own classes, and reading many articles and blogs written by people on the same technological journey that I am on. I have also discovered through all of this, that the best way that I learn is to make my learning personal, by taking something I have a passion and curiosity for and using my professional development and my PLN to learn everything about that subject that I can. I try to keep that in mind as I decide how to teach my curriculum to my students and try my best to find ways to make their learning personal, to take them out of their comfort zone, and to get them to use their skills to begin learning for themselves.
My personal Technology Vision Statement:
Nerinx Hall High School is a community that believes that all students can learn and that all students will rise to challenges when held to high standards. In keeping with this idea, I will use technology to enable all students to not only to learn the curriculum I have planned out for them, but to create an individualized learning environment so each student can reach outside of her comfort zone and develop higher thinking skills and problem solving skills than even they believe possible.
My explanation and support of my Technology Vision Statement:
Since I first began studying to be a teacher, I have always seen technology as a vital part of education. My cooperating teacher from my student teaching noticed how interested I was in learning how technology can be useful part of mathematics learning and all the ideas I brought to my student teaching and told me that is how I would stand out from other new math teachers. In my eighteen years teaching at Nerinx Hall, I have made it my goal to research and implement technology to provide students with a more personalized, individual learning program that pushes them to develop their own critical thinking and problem solving skills so they use the information they learn in my class to attack and solve problems that may be unfamiliar to them. In the following paragraphs, I will explain my journey and the research I used to get to the place that I am now in my steps toward my technology vision.
When I first started teaching at Nerinx Hall, I taught Geometry Honors and Algebra I. I knew that the traditional way to teach Geometry (the way that I had learned) was to introduce theorems and postulates, have students write proofs for those theorems and solve problems using the relationships in the theorems and postulates. The problem with this type of teaching, is there is no student ownership of the knowledge, since the student had no part in seeing the relationship he or she was learning and developing it into a conjecture of his or her own words. Instead, students would follow what the teacher did, and repeat this process when trying to solve similar problems in the textbook. I found this to be very frustrating later in my mathematics journey as the problems became more complicated and required more critical thinking on my part because I had never learned how to apply my mathematical knowledge to problem solving on my own. At Nerinx, we had a program called The Geometer's Sketchpad that allowed students to explore relationships between geometric objects and come up with conjectures of their own. I then taught them how to defend these conjectures through proof, and gave them the opportunity to use this knowledge to solve geometric problems. At this time we had a limited number of very old Macintosh computers to work with, so this was just the beginning of my desire to use technology in order to stimulate the development of critical thinking skills.
After I was teaching at Nerinx for a few years, the administration began looking into starting a one-to-one laptop program. I jumped on the idea since the availability of newer, personal computers would immensly help me in my goal to use technology to develop better critical thinkers and problem solvers. Nerinx began by giving laptops to some teachers and a few students in order for them to research what the best laptop would be for the school and to find ways to implement this technology into the students' classes. Finally, the laptops were chosen and for four years, each new freshmen class received their own Apple laptop. At first, I focused on using the laptops with Sketchpad software to continue what I was already doing (although now that each student had their own computer, they could learn the software much more quickly and could do the investigations I created for it as individuals instead of partners) and also to develop more organization with a class website and note outlines. However, soon I discovered the METC Conference and after attending the first time, came back with all kinds of ideas to encourage higher order thinking skills in my students. I slowly began introducing things like online discussions questions to go with homework problems so each student had to choose at least one problem and explain to the other students in her class how she solved it, using her own words. There was so much research at the time about how if students could explain and teach other students how to solve problems, it enabled them to better understand the problem and helped them to be able to tackle more complicated problems that involved deeper thinking. I was excited to be able to encourage this through the use of wikis and discussion boards. I eventually became a member of the METC Conference planning committee and attended many other technology conferences, and was able to network with several professionals and find all kinds of fascinating ways to use technology to develop higher order thinking skills and problem solving skills. The only problem I had, was that I was still teaching classes of 22-25 students and found it very difficult to personalize the learning experience for each student. I soon found my answer at a math, science and technology conference I attended here in St. Louis.
At this conference, I attended a session called Flip Your Classroom, presented by Aaron Sams. I fell in love with the idea, bought his book (also written by Jon Bergmann, and began developing ways in which I could completely individualize my students' learning. At this time, I had also been using SMARTboards and SMART notebook for my class notes and discovered SMART Response, where each student could put their own answer to a problem into a clicker (or now directly with her laptop) and could check whether they were right or wrong immediately while her answer was recorded in my software. This way I could monitor students responses to see how well they were understanding how to solve problems and could also immediately see when students did not understand something and I needed to go over it again. In the past three years, I have been working on making and implementing videos so that my "lectures" are delivered directly to each student, and giving students time in my class to work together on problem solving so they can use each other and me as a resource for developing those skills instead of trying to develop them on their own with textbook work. Recently, I have begun using Google Classroom in conjunction with Google Docs and Google Forms to develop a program that allows my students to develop conjectures themselves through investigation using The Geometer's Sketchpad and Google Docs and then applying those ideas to problems solving in the classroom individually and collaboratively with immediate feedback through SMART Response.
Although my program is far from perfect and I still have far to go to reach my vision, I am happy with what I have accomplished so far. Most of my research for using technology to reach my goal has been through networking with other professionals, attending conferences and tweaking and applying what I learned to my own classes, and reading many articles and blogs written by people on the same technological journey that I am on. I have also discovered through all of this, that the best way that I learn is to make my learning personal, by taking something I have a passion and curiosity for and using my professional development and my PLN to learn everything about that subject that I can. I try to keep that in mind as I decide how to teach my curriculum to my students and try my best to find ways to make their learning personal, to take them out of their comfort zone, and to get them to use their skills to begin learning for themselves.